Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Open Adar Thread - User Submitted Jokes Edition

Where you are invited to tell your favorite jokes.

Keep them (relatively) clean.

Afternoon Links

I remain busy, and won't be able to blog much for the rest of the day, but these should keep you occupied (not in the legal sense:)

Sultan Knish goes much deeper on Chas Freeman, and familiarity certainly breeds contempt in this case. Soccer Dad fills out the sordid picture.

Ami Isseroff on how Israel is losing the battle for hearts and minds. I'm looking forward to his followups.

Lisa Goldman writes a provocative piece on The Danger From Dubai (h/t Daled Amos).

Richard Cohen's bias and his Arab fans

Richard Cohen's wrote another of his signature op-eds yesterday, where he castigates a minority of Israelis for daring to vote for Avigdor Lieberman. As usual, is it quite dishonest:

The day after the United Nations created the state of Israel, the country's first president, Chaim Weizmann, found time to work on his memoir, "Trial and Error." In it, he issued a warning to the Israeli leaders of today: "I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do with the Arabs." It was Nov. 30, 1947.
Weizmann was an astonishingly accomplished man -- chemist, diplomat, statesman -- but maybe his most uncanny talent was that of seer. Peering into the future, he glimpsed the ugly turn Israeli politics has recently taken and how it is now acceptable to talk in repulsive ways about the country's 1.3 million Arabs. "There must not be one law for the Jew and another for the Arabs," he wrote.

Weizmann's admonition may not be known to Avigdor Lieberman, an immigrant from the former Soviet republic of Moldova and now one of Israel's most important political leaders. Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party placed third in the recent election, meaning he will almost certainly be part of the next government. Lieberman is often called a "nationalist." Maybe so, but he is also an anti-Arab demagogue.
The Arabs of Lieberman's antipathy are not Israel's traditional enemies -- either in Gaza, the West Bank or elsewhere in the Middle East. He focuses instead on the Arabs of Israel proper, about 20 percent of the population. They are his fellow citizens, some of them of dubious loyalty, it is true, and most of them with genuine grievances, it is also true. In essence, Lieberman wants to swap them for Jewish settlers now living provocatively in the occupied West Bank. It's half a good idea.

Guess which half? Arabs, according to Cohen, obviously have the right to live anywhere they want in the world. Jews, not so much.

The issue of Israel's Arabs is complicated. They are not Jews, yet they are expected to be loyal to a Jewish state. They are Arabs, yet they are expected to stand by while their fellow Arabs are pounded -- as in Gaza -- by Israeli guns.

Some of whom are fired by - Israeli Arabs.

Cohen purposefully muddies the concept of "loyalty." One can protest against a nation's actions and still be loyal. One can criticize their government and still be loyal. One can even try to change the government legally and remain loyal to the state. But in Cohen's universe, Israeli Arabs have the unique right to demand that their own nation be destroyed, to support Israel's enemies in any way they see fit. Asking all citizens to be loyal - the problematic and mostly symbolic part of Lieberman's platform - is not discriminatory, and it fits in exactly with that Weizmann wrote, despite Cohen's rhetorical gymnastics to indicate otherwise.

Pakistan and India were created in a similar manner -- a population swap of many millions of people. This was the way things were once done.

Who can imagine the untold thousands of people who would have been butchered in Pakistan/India had there not been that population swap? It is never an ideal solution, but it is conceivable that it is better than the alternative - conceivable to anyone who is honest with themselves, and not grandiose moralizers.

Israel, too, engaged some in ethnic cleansing -- or why else all those Palestinian refugees? But the attempt was both chaotic and, as we can see, not wholly successful.

How's that for proof? Take competing claims by both sides about what happened in 1948, disregard the analyses of many distinguished historians, embrace the ones of people like Ilan Pappe, and throw in the existence of refugees as proof of ethnic cleansing! And then say that the existence of one million Arabs in israel today is not a counterproof of the slanderous assertion of ethnic cleansing - rather, it is proof that the genocidal Zionists were not competent to finish the job! Brilliant!

More important, the concept was anathema to important members of the Zionist establishment such as Weizmann.

And does he have a Weizmann quote to back this up? Did Weizmann advocate the return of all the refugees? Of course he didn't - but Cohen pretends otherwise.

It is clear that the world has grown weary of Israel.

Note that the world is not weary of the Arab Israel conflict, it is not tired about the self-defeating decisions made by Arab leaders to keep Palestinian Arabs stateless - in Cohen's world, everyone is only tired of Jews wanting to live in their own state in peace. Is this observation or projection?

Is it any wonder that Al Quds in Arabic trumpets a headline: American Jewish Writer Warns of Ethnic Cleansing Against Palestinians.

Cohen is the Palestinian Arabs' best friend, because he swallows their propaganda whole, with nary a burp.

Indian writer apologizes for not appearing anti-Israel

Distinguished Indian novelist Shashi Tharoor has a weekly column on various Indian issues. At the outset of the Gaza operation, he wrote:

AS Israeli planes and tanks exact a heavy toll on Gaza, India's leaders and strategic thinkers have been watching with an unusual degree of interest, and some empathy.
Unsurprisingly, India's Government has joined the rest of the world in calling for an end to the military action, but its criticism of Israel has been muted. As Israel demonstrates anew its determination to end attacks on its civilians by militants based in Hamas-controlled territory, many in India, still smarting from the horrors of the Mumbai attacks in November, have been asking: Why can't we do the same?
For many Indians, the temptation to identify with Israel was strengthened by the terrorists' seizure of Mumbai's Chabad House Jewish centre and the painful awareness that India and Israel share many of the same enemies. India, with its 150-million strong Muslim population, has long been a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause and remains staunchly committed to an independent Palestinian state. But the Mumbai attacks confirmed what has become apparent in recent years: the forces of global Islamist terror have added Indians to their target list of reviled "Jews and crusaders".
...When Indians watch Israel take the fight to the enemy, killing those who launched rockets against it and dismantling many of the sites from which the rockets flew, some cannot resist wishing that they could do something similar in Pakistan. India understands, though, that the collateral damage would be too high, the price in civilian lives unacceptable, and the risks of the conflict spiralling out of control too acute to contemplate such an option. So Indians place their trust in international diplomacy and watch with ill-disguised wistfulness as Israel does what they could never permit themselves to do.

The article is clearly about that wistfulness, and while it showed both comparisons and contrasts between India's situation and Israel's, the main point was how ordinary Indians viscerally feel about striking back directly at terror.

But his point was lost on a vocal portion of his audience, who immediately castigated him for even considering that Israel had a reason to react to years of suffering under thousands of rockets aimed at her citizens. So Tharoor was forced to replace a later column with an abject apology:

Many of you have read my article as endorsing Israel's military campaign in Gaza and deplored the article's apparent indifference to the humanitarian tragedy that followed.
I regret the misunderstanding of the intent and thrust of the piece, which was not written as a commentary on the conflict in Gaza. When I wrote the article I was thinking only about india/pakistan - the assault on Gaza had just begun when I put my fingers to the keyboard. (Though the Australian carried it on the 19th, and that was the link forwarded to you, the first paper to use the syndicated column was Beirut's Daily Star on the 8th). Obviously I had no sense at the time of writing of the scale of the israeli action that was to follow and the toll that would be taken in civilian lives. But in any case the article says India cannot, should not and would not do what Israel has done.

It should be noted that by January 8th, the three-week war was well over the halfway mark, as were the number of casualties.

Using the Israel parallel - at a time when my email inbox was brimming with messages of the "why can't we do the same as Israel?" variety - was just a way of bringing greater attention onto India's dilemma and its anguish, while arguing that there is no "Gaza option" for India.
Of course I should have realized that using an unfolding event as a peg would make my argument hostage to the way that situation evolved. Inevitably, some readers would judge the article in the light of what has happened in the two weeks after I wrote it. Had Israel taken out a few rocket sites and withdrawn in 3 or 4 days, as I had expected, perhaps the analogy would have seemed less offensive. But the article was always meant to be more about India's options than about Israel's actions.
Anyway, I am chagrined and chastened...

Even as he admits that his article was accurate - he was getting emails from the wistful Indians he was writing about - the criticisms were clearly so strident that he was forced to apologize for doing nothing wrong.

His crime was that he didn't immediately condemn Israel as a Nazi/fascist/terrorist state, which is apparently de rigueur any time Israel is mentioned in any context.

(h/t Mashi via email)

BTFA: My Name is Earl

For the past few, um, decades I haven't been watching too much network TV. But since I realized that I can watch TV shows on my PDA I have been going through seasons of various interesting-looking TV shows that I missed the first time around.

One of them is My Name is Earl (NBC, Thursday nights.)

The plot of the show is that a petty criminal named Earl Hickey, through an improbable series of events, discovers a simple version of karma that works for him: when he does good things, good things happen to him. So he made a list of everything bad he ever did to anyone else and he tries to make it up to them.

He is surrounded by an interesting array of characters, including his white-trash ex-wife, his improbably brilliant and talented best friend who is now married to his ex, and his dim brother.

The first two seasons of the show concentrated on Earl crossing off list items. With an effective use of flashbacks, some nice plot twists, a wicked sense of humor and some great classic rock, the show maintained its consistency to this formula.

What made it fascinating, though, went much deeper than normal mindless TV fare. Each episode included a real moral dilemma, and Earl had to try to choose to do the right thing with a very unconventional set of tools and constraints. These ethical conundrums kept the show interesting.

The show creators have gone away from that formula in the past two seasons, concentrating more on longer story arcs and less on the moral component of the show. It remains very funny, but it is no longer groundbreaking, relying more on character quirks.

Alas, I have caught up on all the episodes, so now I need to find other interesting TV fare to watch while commuting...

BTFA: Break the Format Adar

Since this is the Jewish month of Adar, where weird and counter-intuitive things tend to happen, I will be occasionally posting clearly unElder-like posts for the next few weeks when time allows. I hope to make them...eclectic.

The posts will be labeled BTFA.

Another wacko Arab theory about ancient Israel

Al-Quds (Arabic) has a lengthy report on Kamal Salibi, a Lebanese professor who has been pushing a theory for decades now that Biblical stories all took place in Arabia, not Israel. Even the Jordan River, he argues, was really the Sarawat Mountains (since he says the word "river" is never used in the Bible) and all Biblical placenames are really names in Arabia, including Jerusalem - in 'Asir, southern Arabia. According to this theory, those crafty Jews renamed Palestinian cities after the Biblical cities during the time of the Hasmonean Kingdom, in the second century BCE, but there were no Jews in Israel beforehand.

The Arabs would use this, of course, to delegitimize any Jewish claim on Israel.

Debunking this is easy, if only from a single archaeological find that was announced yesterday:

The Israel Antiquities Authority on Monday announced the discovery of a large building dating to the time of the First and Second Temples during an excavation in the village of Umm Tuba in southern Jerusalem.

The excavation was conducted by Zubair Adawi on behalf of the antiquities authority, prior to the start of construction there by a private contractor.

The archaeological remains include several rooms arranged around a courtyard, in which researchers found a potter's kiln and pottery vessels. The pottery remains seem to date from the eighth century B.C.E. (First Temple period).

The excavators also found royal seal impressions on some of the pottery fragments that date to the era of Hezekiah, King of Judah (end of the eighth century B.C.E.).

Four "LMLK" impressions (which indicate the items belonged to the king) were discovered on handles of large jars used to store wine and oil. Seals of two high-ranking officials named Ahimelekh ben Amadyahu and Yehokhil ben Shahar, who served in the government, were also found.

The Yehokhil seal was stamped on one of the LMLK impressions before the jar was fired in a kiln and this is a rare example of two such impressions appearing together on a single handle.

Biblical characters from the First Temple period hanging around in Jerusalem in the 8th century BCE writing in Hebrew sort of demolishes Kamal Salibi's theory.

"Issues, action, power, self-interest."

I read this passage over the shoulder of someone in a train today:

The day after the rally, Marty decided it was time for me to do some real work, and he handed me a long list of people to interview.Find out their self-interest, he said. That’s why people become involved in organizing -because they think they’ll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power.

Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts.

I know that these words are out of context, but it was still a little bit of a shock to see that they were written by Barack Obama in his Dreams From My Father autobiography.

The Israeli Left attacks co-existence

To give an idea of how far left the Left in Israel has become, check out this NYT article:

Achinoam Nini, a singer and peace activist, has long stirred controversy here. Known abroad by her stage name, Noa, she has recorded with Arab artists, refused to perform in the occupied West Bank, condemned Israeli settlements there and had concerts canceled because of bomb threats from the extreme right.

But lately it is the left that has been angry with Ms. Nini. Chosen by Israel to represent the country at the Eurovision Song Contest — this year being held in Moscow in May with an expected television audience of 100 million — Ms. Nini asked if she could bring along her current artistic collaborator, an Israeli Arab singer, Mira Awad.

The selection committee liked the idea of having both Arab and Jewish citizens in the contest for the first time. But coinciding as it did with Israel’s Gaza war and the rise of Avigdor Lieberman, the ultranationalist politician who threatens Israeli Arabs with a loyalty oath, the committee’s choice was labeled by many on the left and in the Arab community as an effort to prettify an ugly situation.

A petition went around demanding that the duo withdraw, saying they were giving the false impression of coexistence in Israel and trying to shield the nation from the criticism it deserved. It added, “Every brick in the wall of this phony image allows the Israeli Army to throw 10 more tons of explosives and more phosphorus bombs.”

Neither Ms. Nini, 39, nor Ms. Awad, 33, has been deterred. But since they consider themselves peace advocates, they are a bit surprised. The antiwar movement, they say, seems to have turned into a Hamas apology force. That, together with the political turn rightward in Israel, means that while the two are being sent to represent this mixed and complex society, they also feel a bit orphaned by it.

Notice that the Times cannot find a single voice on the Right that is upset at the idea of an Arab co-representing Israel in the Eurovision contest. Even though the article gratuitously refers to Avigdor Lieberman as being "ultranationalist" there are no smug labels for the pro-Hamas, anti-co-existence "left." Yet once one takes out that adjective, one would see that the Israeli Left is far more extreme than the Right that always gets tagged with that label.

Later in the article we find out

But recent politics have also clearly taken their toll. During the war, Ms. Nini sent out a letter on her blog condemning the Islamists of Hamas, and calling on her “Palestinian brothers” to join together to eliminate what she called the ugly monster of Hamas. It was widely interpreted as an endorsement of Israel’s war in Gaza, although she said it was not.
“What I wrote was based on what my Palestinian friends in Gaza told me, that they are threatened by Hamas,” she said.

The common-sense left is being drowned out by the pro-terror pretend-left, even in Israel.

Ahmadinejad the Monkey

From YNet:

During a recent live broadcast of a popular children' show on Iranian television, one young girl surprised viewers when she related how her father called her stuffed monkey 'Ahmadinejad', the name of the Islamic Republic's president.

An Iranian news agency reported on Tuesday that, during a telephone call that took place on the show 'Uncle Fornaj', the show's host asked a young female caller whether she was good girl who obeyed her parents.

"I'm a good girl and my father bought me a doll," the girl responded, adding that the doll was stuffed monkey. "My father calls it Ahmadinejad," she said in response to the host's follow-up question.

'Uncle Fornaj' is one of the most highly-watched shows in Iran, broadcast on the country's premier state-run channel and hosted by a local children's celebrity.

Well, the resemblance is pretty uncanny.

Yesterday, the Islamic Jihad terror movement held a large meeting to praise the behavior of Palestinian Arab "journalists" in Gaza during the Israeli operation.

As usual in meetings like these, all pretense of objectivite news gathering goes out the window - the speeches make clear that the purpose of the media in Gaza is to further the "resistance" and to "expose Zionist crimes." Certainly the so-called journalists are not expected to report on Hamas stealing aid, on people killed in Islamic Jihad crossfire, or on Hamas kneecapping Fatah members in public.

Notice how hungry these Islamic Jihad members and their propagandists appear to be, after years of the Zionist siege that they keep talking about.

Confirmation that Hamas has unexploded ordnance

The UN reported last week a large amount of unexploded ordnance from the Gaza operation had disappeared before it could be safely disposed of. I had exclusively reported that Hamas had claimed to taken those explosives with the intent of using them in new weapons, saying that they were "a gift from the sky."

Today, we have further confirmation, from Palestine Today:

Private sources confirmed that the Palestinian resistance obtained the Israeli missiles which did not explode during the aggression on Gaza, saying that resistance experts were able to dismantle the missiles and extract the the explosive material inside.

The same sources pointed out that they will be able to manufacture hundreds of improvised explosive anti-tank devices, after the dismantling of dozens of huge rockets that did not explode during the Israeli war.

The sources added that the experts were able to extract the detonators of the missiles as well.

The sources said the explosive article by Israeli missiles, located in one of the finest and most powerful species in bringing about breakthroughs in the explosions and the place where he received meant that the Palestinian resistance and put her hand on the precious treasure of the Israeli explosives.

Palestinian factions would use quantities of explosive materials from remnants of the wars that took place in Egypt's Sinai for the manufacture of missiles against the Israeli occupation forces, but they were of poor quality.

The last sentence is interesting, because it seems to confirm that some Hamas collaborators are in Egypt, scouring the Sinai for old mines to smuggle to Gaza.